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RMF Summary: Week of August 8 - 14, 2011

August 8

Visit of St Thomas to KeralaDevendra posts: See the report that appeared in The New Indian Express on debunking
the visit of St Thomas to India. It appeared in the Chennai edition on
August 5, 2011. ...

August 8

SAA Rizvi and Imtiaz AhmadManas asks: "A while back it was mentioned in this forum that SAA Rizvi and Imtiaz
Ahmed were hounded out of AMU and JNU respectively, apparently for not
toeing the Marxist-secularist line of negation, whitewashing and history
engineering. Does anyone have any reference for this?.."

Professor Ramesh Rao on the Ghulam Nabi Fai issue
Champagne, seminar and ISI
August 05, 2011 11:36:50 PMRamesh Rao
The genteel face of Track 2 diplomacy was given a crude scar by the FBI’s inquiry into the Ghulam Nabi Fai operation and this time the usual counter (“its Hindu nationalist cant”) is not available for the defense of the liberal elite

About ten years ago, when at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, I presented a content analysis of The New York Times and The Washington Post’s coverage of Indian matters over a three-year period (1998-2000), I was heckled by some who sought to shut me up. This was when the NDA held the reins in Delhi. In my paper I had concluded that the Post, despite some partisan editorialising, was more circumspect
about Indian matters but the NYT was consistently tendentious and didactic.

The people who tried to shut me up included an academic/activist from California, along with a couple of graduate students representing the “left-secular-progressive” front. For them, anything that was even remotely supportive of the NDA regime was anathema..."

We carry the followups to this post in full without excerpting to ensure that the message is clearly understood. Rajiv Malhotra's response is stinging:
"What Ramesh Rao fails to mention is that Infinity Foundation wanted an analysis of US media bias against India, and he was given the grant to do this work. It was eventually finished with the help of other scholars we brought in... Infinity Foundation also sponsored research by a team of scholars at Penn State University to analyze bias against Indians in US film and television. Likewise, there were grants given to analyze school
textbook biases - years before such topics became fashionable among the diaspora. After 400 such grants to a variety of scholars and many millions of dollars given away over several years, I finally reached the conclusion that I had to publish my own original research that makes its points with hard hitting
facts. This is not a praise for me, but rather an assessment of the shoddy quality of most academic scholars in the humanities especially when it comes to India related work. It seems that the students who were too bad to get into things like science, IT, medicine, law or business are the ones who entered the humanities. Unfortunately, this low caliber lot are empowered to speak as the "experts".

Srinarayan responds:
" i am a chemical engr from iit- chennai and do not agree that those who go in humanities are of lower caliber. i would appreciate if we would avoid such comments."

Rajiv's followup:
"Emotions and political correctness has no place when hard facts are being discussed.

It is a FACT that bright kids choose careers with best prospects as evidenced by surveys, exam scores of students entering various fields. Based on this, it is TRUE to say that the brightest go for certain disciplines and unfortunately
humanities suffer.

There was once a time in India when the brightest pursued very intellectual fields without considering material wealth opportunities. Thats why brains like Adi Shankara and hundreds of others we know entered fields where they did not
stand to make any wealth. This is simply not true today. Its reflect on the state of social priorities and the measures by which we judge people.

For you to deny this because it is discomforting is hardly responsible. Instead, you should inquire WHY are bright kids not preferring humanities on ground of principles, and what would it take to encourage that."

China Banning U.S. Professors Elicits Silence From CollegesRakesh posts: Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- They call themselves the “Xinjiang 13.” They have been denied permission to enter China, prohibited from flying on a Chinese airline and pressured to adopt China- friendly views. To return to China, two wrote statements disavowing support for the independence movement in Xinjiang province.

They aren’t exiled Chinese dissidents. They are American scholars from universities, such as Georgetown and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have suffered a backlash from China unprecedented in academia since diplomatic relations resumed in 1979. Their offense was co-writing “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland,” a 484-page paperback published in 2004.

“I wound up doing the stupidest thing, bringing all of the experts in the field into one room and having the Chinese take us all out,”... "

Rajiv's response:
"Thanks to Rakesh for sending this VERY IMPORTANT ITEM below. I have written many times that China controls the study of its civilization, standing up to western pressure on so-called "intellectual freedom." India works the opposite - thinking it is a favor when others study India regardless of what they end up saying. India has an inferiority complex of being ignored, so its leaders are craving to be "included" no matter what. hence the programs in USA that study Indian languages, cultures, etc are fashionable WITHOUT THE DUE
DILIGENCE TO MAKE SURE THE OUTPUT IS NOT A MISREPRESENTATION."

August 12

More applause for Sheldon Pollock
Some may find this article, "Columbia U. Professor Broadens Access
to Sanskrit, Ancient Language of the Elite", which appeared in today's
Chronicle of Higher...

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) has opened a centre in the South Korean capital Seoul and set up a chair of Sanskrit at the Preah Sihanouk Raja Buddhist University in Cambodia. These initiatives are part of the Indian government's 'Look East' policy. ICCR president Karan Singh talked with Shobhan Saxena about India's growing soft power and need for more engagement with countries in our extended neighbourhood."

Rajiv Malhotra responds:
" In fact in 2005 Infinity Foundation sponsored the first Sanskrit Conference in Thailand where a sanskrit studies program and journal were inaugurated. The then BJP govt and its famous HRD minister had refused to fund it, and a Delhi Univ. prof had contacted me to salvage India's image in the eyes of the Thai royal family who were the conference patrons. So I became the "Indian representative"
and source of funds (a small sum just symbolically to save face for India). But in the last minute once it became clear that this was going to be a big success with the royal family present, the honorable HRD minister suddenly announced
that he would attend. The Indian embassy scrambled to get him into the program in a prominent spot. The Thai Crown Princess attended every minute of the 3 day event and threw a big series of cultural programs in honor of India and Sanskrit. As the inaugural speaker, I presented my paper on Sanskrit Phobia and the inter-civilization issues raised by Sanskrit studies. This paper later got adapted and is now on Sulekha...
It was published by their Sanskrit studies journal. The famous Gombrich (Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford) was present and felt tensed by statements about how sanskrit studies in the west in fact undermined the sanskriti civilization behind the language.

The GOI involvement was entirely driven by the craving for media and PR attention by certain bigwigs, not any deep love for Sanskrit or sanskriti. The same is true of the present ICCR - mostly driven to bring back pictures that can be shown to visitors to impress: "I had lunch with the president of that country who rarely allows visitors"; I met the very old head of that monastery and he gifted me this rare manuscript"; etc.

Many of these GOI programs are funding the pro-Aryan camp of scholars ..."

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